by Mary Gordon
And Moira had said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Rory, will you give over that pious shite. Bergman has no more interest in the Virgin Mary than my arse.”
“I’ve heard your arse is quite interested in the Virgin,” Claire said.
“So it’s well ahead of Bergman.”
Claire, with her girlish, breastless body, her cap of tight curls, wearing only the lightest shade of pink lipstick, cutting her nails like a boy’s. And Moira with her thick black hair, in a single plait, and the black eyes and the un-Irish olive skin. “My tinker blood,” she’d said, proudly.
Jocelyn had thought they were her friends. But in the time when she felt she was going mad, because she didn’t know what anything really was, what was really happening, when she couldn’t believe anything anybody said … she felt that even Claire and Moira, if they hadn’t exactly lied, had presented her with some version of untruth.
One day, she’d run into them coming out of a store that had always puzzled her. The mannequins were nuns, deliberately unsexy, block-shaped rather than curvaceous. She had found the window display sad: garments meant for concealment rather than allure; serviceable, unadorned, unlovely.
She couldn’t understand what Clare and Moira were doing coming out of that store, their arms full of packages. Her puzzlement must have showed on her face because Moira had said, “Shopping for my trousseau, don’t you know.”
And Claire had said, “We’ll have a drink to celebrate the dear about to be departed. Only keep it under your hat.”
Moira was going to be a nun. She was leaving for something called the novitiate in six weeks.
Jocelyn was appalled. It seemed appalling to her; beautiful, brilliant Moira throwing her life away, hiding herself behind stone walls. She had suggested gently, she hoped, that perhaps it hadn’t been quite fair to Rory, to let him go on thinking there’d be a chance they’d spend their lives together. Moira’s lips had thinned almost to invisibility and she’d said, “There are some things too deep for words, too complicated for words. It wouldn’t have been telling the truth to talk about it, because I didn’t know yet what I felt and I could only decide in the privacy of my own heart. Privacy is not concealment. It is not untruth.”
But they had never been quite comfortable with each other again. Because what Moira was doing seemed just too strange to her, too difficult for her to understand in someone whom she had believed to be a friend. Now she wondered: was there a kind of jealousy of it? A jealousy that her friend had a secret life, deeper, richer, more glamorous than any life she had access to? It made her friend unknowable to her; as if she were someone who had been born in another century, and the person Jocelyn thought she had been speaking to was only a phantom, a chimera, the product of a dream.
“We’d better drink up, because this one won’t be getting the water of life too much from now on. We won’t be able even to see her in the first year, while she’s in postulancy. But I’d say in the novitiate they’ll ease up on you.”
They were using these strange words, “postulancy,” “novitiate,” as if they were ordinary, as if they were saying “knife,” “fork,” “glass,” “spoon.”
“God knows what you’ll be up to without me to keep an eye on you. I suppose the sky will be the limit with you and the French fella.”
“Well, Jesus, what would you have me do? Join you in the sisterhood of perpetual Irish virginity?”
Jocelyn was completely confused. They had had a lot to drink. They saw that she was lost, and she could see them sharing a look that meant, “Shall we let her in on it?” And then they decided that they would.
“You see, my wild American rose, my husband isn’t so much for the below the waist business. It seems I haven’t the right equipment. Not like your Johnny.”
How long did it take her to understand that she was saying that Diarmid was homosexual?
“I love him with all my heart, you see. My best friend. We’re the greatest of pals.”
“More than you can say for the President of the Holy Name Society and his lovely wife, Prefect of Sodality.”
They threw their heads back and laughed at a joke whose meaning Jocelyn had no access to.
So the friends she thought she had made had all been lying to her. And lying to each other.
But she should have known, because almost from the beginning her friendship with Moira had been marked by lies. The first had turned into a joke. Jocelyn had invited Moira for dinner one night when Johnny was meant to be working late. She had bought what she would have called lamb chops, what were in Dublin called mutton chops. They had just moved into their own apartment and she was excited about cooking for another woman, a woman whom she liked, whom she admired.
But before she could serve Moira, Moira grabbed her stomach and said, “Oh, dearie, I’m afraid my girlfriend has just arrived.”
And Jocelyn didn’t know what she meant, so Moira had to explain, her “time of the month,” and she ran out of the house saying she’d come by tomorrow, and they’d have a great time then.
When Johnny came home, and she heated over the lamb chop for him, and told him what had happened with Moira, he bent over laughing. “Oh, God, Jossie, you were going to serve her meat on a Friday and she just couldn’t do it, under pain of mortal sin; she lives by that kind of thing, even though she thinks it’s tosh, she says she still has to live by it. She didn’t want to embarrass you so she pretended to be ill.”
“She lied to me?”
“Oh, why would you put it that way? Think of it as a sign of her regard.”
“But she wasn’t telling me something I needed to know. I could have gone on making the same mistake over and over again.”
“The thing is, Joss, we believe people will twig sooner or later. But in their own time. We’re not great believers in rushing things here.”
“You can say that again,” Jocelyn said, because the inability of all her Irish friends to get anywhere on time, to do things when they said they would be done had been a source of great vexation to her, and her vexation was a great source of amusement to her friends. And so, when she said, “You can say that again,” Johnny picked her up in his arms, threw her on the bed, and said, “We’re not great believers in rushing things here,” and made love to her slowly, quoting from Beckett, “ ‘With a slowness that would arouse an elephant.’ Not that you’re an elephant, you’re my lovely kitty cat, my sweet, fastidious pet.”
He was so generous in his praising of her body. What he loved, he said, was the contained whiteness of her body. “Like a lovely, peeled almond,” he said, kissing every inch of her, and that, she could remember fifty years later, was a pleasure so complete that she thought she might be carried away somewhere. Love unto death, she remembered thinking. But it hadn’t been unto death. It had, rather soon, been over.
She believed that he loved her body. But after a while, she didn’t know what she could believe.
She looks over at Johnny, an old man now, perhaps still handsome, but all his freshness leached. She had not been able to bear being married to a liar. She could no longer avoid the truth of it, after the big lie had been unmasked. Is a fifty-year-old lie still a lie? Or has it become just a story?
“I’ll need to be packing a bag, Jossie. I’ll be needing to go to a funeral.”
She was rather excited; she’d been told that funerals, rather than weddings, were the great social events for the Irish.
“Oh, no, my love, it’s a long tedious journey. To Longford City. Changing buses, all of them uncomfortable, and then there’d be nothing for you to do … it would just be family telling stories and drinking too much and I don’t know where we’d stay. No, you’re much better off staying here in our cozy nest that you’ve made so wonderful. But I’d appreciate it if you’d do me the favor of packing my bag.”
He was always impressed by her packing skills. “Aren’t you great,” he’d say, every time she folded a shirt or found a place for socks in a corner of the bag. But she was disap
pointed that she wouldn’t be going to the funeral. And for the first time, he became impatient with her when she told him of her disappointment. “Will you give over, I’ll be back before I’m gone.”
A little shocked, a little bruised, she complained to Moira and Claire when they met in the pub, just the three of them. “I just can’t understand why he acted so unlike himself,” she said, coughing a little from the cigarettes which she was trying to learn to smoke, particularly around Moira and Claire, who smoked, as they said of themselves, like chimneys.
“Well, I’d say his father’s death came as a shock. Though I am surprised he wouldn’t have you with him at the funeral.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, absolutely puzzled. “Johnny’s father’s been dead over ten years.”
Moira and Claire looked at each other uneasily. “Well then somebody died again with his name just yesterday,” Claire said, and Moira laughed, but the laugh wasn’t their usual laugh and there was unease in the smoky air.
“It’s his father’s funeral he’s going to, pet.”
Jocelyn felt herself falling through, as if the wood of the pub floor, which she believed to have been firm enough to support her, had suddenly rotted, and she was dropping straight down, plumb, to some dark place, but no, the drop down wasn’t straight, she was twirling, head over heels, heels over head, with no sense of a final landing, only that the landing, when it came, would be painful, hard.
All she could do was say some words which she knew would make her pathetic to these two women, her friends.
“He told me his father died when he was a teenager. An accident on the farm, something about a tractor.”
Claire and Moira tried not to laugh. “Oh, Lord, Jossie. Johnny’s father wasn’t a farmer, he owned a draper’s shop in Longford City. Johnny wouldn’t know one end of a cow from the other.”
Jocelyn tried not to cry. She remembered being a child in school, not knowing an answer and knowing that tears would only double her humiliation, but the child she was couldn’t keep tears back, made fists of her hands to dig her nails into her palms, but it was no use, the tears spilled out, hot, choking: she was helpless, weak; the tears would not be stopped.
“Why would he have done that? Why would he have told me those things when they weren’t true?”
“Probably because he wanted them to be true, and he thought you’d like to hear them.”
“But what do I do now?” she said, looking at her friends with a desperation. “What do I do next, how do I tell him that I know he lied to me?”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to be telling him,” Moira said, and Claire nodded her agreement.
“But I have to tell him. I couldn’t have this secret between us. It would poison everything.”
“Only if you let it,” Claire said. “What would poison everything is if you shamed him. You have to understand the Irish, Jocelyn. We’re easily shamed: it’s usually our first response to nearly everything. We’re a nation of shamed children, shamed by our parents, the church, the British, maybe even the land itself. And when we’re shamed we want to flee from what’s shamed us, flee as if we were running for our lives. And then we want to hurt the thing we’ve fled. No, Jocelyn, you mustn’t let him know you know. You mustn’t shame him.”
“I can’t,” she said, suddenly dry-eyed, suddenly certain. “It’s not a way that I can live.”
“Well, my love, I’d say then it’s your funeral. And it will be no Finnegan’s wake, let me tell you. There won’t be lots of fun at this.”
And of course they were right, because it was the death of their love. She couldn’t sleep, and when he came home, late, the cold of the early fall on his rough cheeks (his beard was always rough by nightfall), which he rubbed against her to wake her, he thought for love.
She had to say it, she had to speak the words, and she was compelled, as she had felt her body compelling her to weep. She had to say what had to be said.
“Why did you do it, Johnny? Why did you lie to me? About your father?”
And he stood and paced up and down the small room, pounding his fist into his hand, walking in smaller circles.
“It just happened, somehow. Because I didn’t want to burden you with the real sordid story. That I hated my father. That he was a brute to us, my sisters and my mother, hoarding his money, refusing to get someone in to help her when she had a weak heart, never the slightest word of praise, only the cutting edge of his tongue, cutting you down to size.”
“Why did you tell me you grew up on a farm?”
“Because I hated where I grew up. The oh-so-respectable draper’s shop selling the oh-so-respectable clothes to the oh-so-respectable women who only wanted to pass for English, and the town with nothing in it, I couldn’t wait to get out. And so I made, what we call in the catechism, a mental reservation. What they would tell you, even the priests and the nuns, especially the priests and the nuns, was that, for example, if someone came to the door, a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness, that your mother didn’t want to speak to, you could say, without sinning, ‘My mother isn’t home,’ and you made the mental reservation, ‘My mother isn’t home to you.’ So I made a kind of mental reservation: my father is dead, and in my mind I said, ‘My father is dead to me.’ And I said, ‘I grew up on a farm,’ and what I said in my mind was ‘I grew up on a farm in my dreams.’ ”
“But you made me believe things that weren’t true, Johnny. You made me think you were a person that you’re not.”
He knelt down on the floor beside her and took her hands, began kissing them. “No, Jossie, I am the person I told you I was. What I’m not is the son of a mean, pious, begrudging bastard who grew up in an ugly, dead town. I’m much more the person of the stories I told than the person of the circumstances of my birth.”
She felt her mouth go dry, the skin at the base of her throat go cold, her hands freezing; she took them from his hands and put them under the covers. Was he mad? What he said made a kind of sense, but it was the sense of a madman. Once again, she felt the floor on which her bed rested falling through, but the insubstantial flooring didn’t make her fall down; she was carried aloft, and she saw herself, in her white nightgown, in her white bed, whirled through the heavens, with no prospect, ever, of landing on any firm place she might know.
“Will you forgive me, Jossie? I never meant to hurt you. I wanted to make things easier for you, lovelier for you, happier for you. Can you forgive me for that?”
She felt the boy in him, the suffering boy, and she could not keep back forgiveness from this wretched child. But he could never be the man she loved once; that man had been a phantom, and had been carried away, as she had felt herself carried away, into the heavens, only she had come back now, but he was gone forever.
She wonders now if things would have been different if, a week later, John Kennedy had not been assassinated.
A cliché of her generation: you always remember where you were when you heard the news of John Kennedy’s death. And yet when Americans were recently asked in some survey about the television images that had most gripped their imaginations, the Twin Towers came first, the death of John Kennedy falling far below the first man walking on the moon. It was another thing that made her feel old, and outside the center of the world. No images were more deeply incised in her mind than the Dallas motorcade, veiled Jackie elegantly grieving, John-John’s salute.
She had been in a pub when she heard of it. The shock of it, the greatest of a series of shocks that had made her feel alone. Moira leaving for the convent; Johnny’s lie, the many lies, about his father, his whole past; even Claire’s revelation about Diarmid and then their insistence to her that it was all right to cover up, to hide, to change the truth if it wasn’t what you liked.
Her sense of her own strangeness, of her own exclusion, of not belonging, bubbled up, in the days following John Kennedy’s death, overflowing into a froth of primitive possessive rage. He is not yours. He is ours. America’s.
She felt enraged at his being claimed by the Irish as one of theirs. Our dead. That was a primitive idea; the words were primitive, she knew. And yet they lodged in her mind and would not be uprooted. Our dead, she wanted to cry out to the weeping crowds.
His youth, his beauty, his voice and gestures—she could hear him saying the word “vigah,” his hopefulness, his belief in change, in progress, these belonged to America, not Ireland. And all of them seemed to be rushing into churches, all of them, the most vehement atheists, and the most scurrilous insulters, reveling in every blasphemy, hurtling now into dark, cold buildings where they could hunker and mumble in Latin. There she would not go. She’d believed what they said about the church, it had been her only source of knowledge about it. She’d believed what they said those buildings represented. She could not now so easily unbelieve. But what did they believe, most deeply, what did they value in the bottoms of their hearts, underneath all the bluster, the bravado-filled, rebellious striking out? Then, shuffling out of churches to pubs to sing “The Minstrel Boy” and weep and drink and cross themselves again.
A lie, a lie. He is not yours. He’s ours. Our dead. America’s. She wanted to stand up on the bar and sing “America the Beautiful.” Shout it like a madwoman over the Irish words. She wanted to say, Did you know, any of you, that I wore a straw hat with his name engraved on it, ringing doorbells in Republican New Canaan, arguing at night with my parents, begging them to vote, to vote for me, winning them over: he was Catholic—oh yes, my friends, it bothered them … they feared he would be taking orders from Rome; my mother, who had volunteered for years at Planned Parenthood, feared what that meant especially. I convinced my father first; he was a war hero, Dad, and then my mother: Mama, look at Nixon’s eyes. He’s not an honest man. What she did not say to him: he is making it possible for us, all of us Americans, to live in a new, larger way.
Youth and beauty and hope and then the other faces as deeply incised: Lee Harvey Oswald, his face a blur of disappointed failure, and then impossible to believe, he is shot by Jack Ruby whom she can only think of in movie terms. Cheap hood. All of us American. Not Irish. All of it ours. Not yours. Ours.
